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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Near as I can tell, the WN types coined the term. They applied a critique to the mainstream Right, and then answered that critique with their own prescriptions. The thing is, WN types are a vanishing minority, and much of their critique wasn't actually dependent on specifically WN axioms, or even particularly novel to their ideology. A lot of relative-to-WNs "normies" adopted positions generally similar to that critique, but then supplied their own prescriptions rather than drawing the conclusions the WNs prefered. Given that these relative normies outnumbered the actual WN types by several orders of magnitude, it was trivial for them to appropriate the "alt-right" label for themselves, and claim the WNs had no actual ownership of it.

This article captures the landscape at the time.

Anything associated as closely with racism and bigotry as the alternative right will inevitably attract real racists and bigots. Calmer members of the alternative right refer darkly to these people as the “1488ers,” and for all their talk of there being “no enemies to the right,” it’s clear from the many conversations we’ve had with alt-righters that many would rather the 1488ers didn’t exist.

These are the people that the alt-right’s opponents wish constituted the entire movement. They’re less concerned with the welfare of their own tribe than their fantasies of destroying others. 1488ers would likely denounce this article as the product of a degenerate homosexual and an ethnic mongrel...

...1488ers are the equivalent of the Black Lives Matter supporters who call for the deaths of policemen, or feminists who unironically want to #KillAllMen. Of course, the difference is that while the media pretend the latter are either non-existent, or a tiny extremist minority, they consider 1488ers to constitute the whole of the alt-right.

Those looking for Nazis under the bed can rest assured that they do exist. On the other hand, there’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.

Of course, while a vanishing minority, the WN types did enjoy one advantage: they wanted to control the label, and the media likewise wanted them to control the label. Charlottesville provided the necessary pretext, and the media went to work cementing the "alt-right = nazi" meme indelibly into the public consciousness. Anyone with the slightest bit of insight saw this particular battle was lost, and so ceded the term permanently to the WNs. "Dissident Right" was the next-best alternative label for the mass of non-WN, non-establishment right-wingers to adopt, but the population as a whole lacks much in the way of coherence or structure. MAGA is probably the largest block at the moment, but even there you see significant variance between the die-hard Trump partisans and the people who think Trump is, at the moment, weakly, the best of a bad set of alternatives.

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